No words were spoken, no insults hurled, no battle-cries roared; all understood at once the direness of this skirmish. It was life-and-death, quite literally. No quarter would be asked, none would be given; death was the only certainty.
Some men are born with the talent to paint pictures that at once expels the viewer’s breath entirely from their lungs, and some are born with the ability to write pieces of music that stir the human soul, catapulting the listener’s spirit from its darkest depths to its most transcendent heights. Not Sigurd Haraldsson, although, like Mozart or Picasso, he too had been born with a prodigious gift. His talent, however, had been that of violence, and it was a dark gift that he had put to widespread use over the centuries.
Now, on this dimly lit stair landing in an old mansion, he spun and whirled with the acrobatic flow of a flamenco dancer, his powerful limbs swirling with fury in a tornado of carnage. The men all descended on him at once; Ukrainian veterans of countless street and prison brawls, there was not one among them who shook with fear as this pale yeti of a man thundered into their midst. And then, alongside these gangsters there was Daekwon, through whose veins the blood-boiling fury of imminent vengeance was gushing, unabated. Paola’s death loomed stark in his mind, the anguishing memory of her laughter and shy smiles driving liquid steel, red-hot from the forge, through the young man’s muscles. This man, this whirling giant who was crashing through the Ukrainians like a wrecking ball, was one of those responsible, in some way, for the foul crime of snuffing out Paola’s presence from this world, and like every single one of them who had had a hand in her demise, Daekwon was determined to make them pay in blood for what they had done. He aimed his Glock, trying to get a clear shot at the huge man, his heart hammering with combat-mandated excitement in his chest.
The Ukrainians were not driven by the same sort of motivation that spurred foolhardy courage through Daekwon’s veins, but they fought fiercely nonetheless. Seasoned as they were, though, none could match the ancient warrior for speed, skill and accuracy. With his first move of the death dance, Sigurd windmilled his right arm horizontally forward, ducking under a vicious swing from a baseball bat and simultaneously plunging the blade of the trench knife into the side of the bat-wielder’s neck. In the same motion, without pausing, he spun around on the ball of one foot, ripped out the bat-wielder’s trachea from behind and slammed the trench knife hilt-deep into a brawny opponent’s ear, just as the man was raising a machete over his head to strike. A lithe fighter surged forward with a fireman’s axe as another raised a nine-millimetre pistol to fire, and yet another two charged in with baseball bats raised, while Daekwon, cursing and snarling, circled the perimeter of this hurricane of anarchy, hoping to get a shot in without hitting any of his allies.
In a flurry of motion Sigurd whipped the edge of the blade across one bat-wielder’s throat, opening it wide and unleashing a gush of arterial blood, and a split-second later he crashed a bone-shattering uppercut with the knuckleduster section of the trench knife into the thin man’s face, finishing off this manoeuvre by diving into a forward-tumbling roll, evading both a baseball-bat swing and a volley of rounds fired from a Ukrainian’s pistol. Daekwon was almost hit by the flurry of bullets, and, yelping with fright, he had to dive for cover when the desperate gangster started firing.
With the effortless agility of a breakdancer on the floor, Sigurd spun about, tripping up the gunman with a low, whipping sweep of his leg, and then, with the momentum of the kick propelling the rest of his body, he rolled flat to the left on his side, slamming a blade through the gunman’s eye into his brain, while just managing to dodge a brutal downward chop from the axeman, who was dazed from his broken jaw but still brimming over with battle-wrath.
Righting himself on the ground and raising his body up so that he was kneeling in a lunge position, Sigurd aimed a deliberately clumsy stab at the axeman, who side-stepped it with ease and countered with a vicious horizontal swing, stepped into the blow to give it as much force as possible.
This was exactly what Sigurd had wanted him to do. He ducked under the singing axe blade and propelled himself forward, stabbing his overhand-gripped knife into the man’s groin. In a swift turnabout he spun, sprang up to his full height, and then plunged the other blade into the soft flesh between the man’s throat and collar bone.
His opponent jerked and shuddered as the axe slipped from his grasp, but now, with so many men down, Daekwon finally had the chance to take a shot at Sigurd. He sprang across the room, creating space to shoot, and then unleashed a volley of semi-automatic fire. The moment he did this, though, Sigurd swung the thin man’s body around in front of him – impaled and anchored as it was with his trench knives, which held the dying man as fast as any butcher’s hooks – and used him as a human shield.
As Daekwon’s volley of nine-millimetre bullets was thudding into the body in front of him, Sigurd slipped his right hand out of the knuckleduster-grip of the trench knife embedded in his human shield’s throat and whipped his hand up, catching the baseball bat that was scything towards his head. The bat-wielder stared with surprise-wide eyes at the huge hand that had just caught the bat he had swung – and his eyes remained frozen wide-open as Sigurd gave the bat a vicious yank,
